Sallie Bingham

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You are here: Home / Theater / Unbearable Truth

Unbearable Truth

May 19th, 2019 by Sallie Bingham in Theater 1 Comment

Annette Bening and Tracy Letts in "All My Sons" - Roundabout Theatre Company, NYC

Annette Bening and Tracy Letts in “All My Sons” – Roundabout Theatre Company, NYC

When I came out of the Roundabout Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons, I immediately faced an unbearable truth.

This is what makes the play great. It can never be dated because the moral question it asks can never be answered: are we responsible for the fate of people to whom we are not related and whom we will never even know?

In the play, a family manages to survive the fact that the patriarch, who manufactured airplane parts during World War 11, is responsible (maybe) for the deaths of 21 pilots because he shipped out cracked cylinder heads.

One son, a pilot, has died—although he did not fly the kind of bomber the defective cylinder heads used. His father, the manufacturer, is destroyed when his other son forces him to face what he has done.

When I came out of the Roundabout Theatre production of Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons, I immediately faced an unbearable truth.

But: does anyone have the right to pull away the veils of denial and delusion that allow all human beings to live with our inevitable acts of betrayal? Does “telling the truth” to someone who can’t bear it make the truth teller a murderer?

The question flared for me when I walked out of the Broadway theatre into the scene of what we have become, in this country and all over the world.

People. Masses of people, nearly trampling each other as they shouted and pushed under neon lights that must be visible from outer space. People spilling out of the sidewalks and into the streets, blocking traffic. Cars crawling and honking, police standing by with nothing to do—a mob too big for the street, too big for the world.

It is impossible to imagine what would happen if someone began to shout about climate disruption, about what all these bodies and all these lights mean for the fate of our world.

Of course, such a warning could never be heard over the ear-shattering clamor of police sirens, car horns, and hundreds of people pressed together and shouting at the tops of their lungs.

If we really believed that we are destroying the earth, would we be able to go on? Or would we, like the man in Miller’s play who had to face his (possible) responsibility for 21 deaths (just 21!) have to put a bullet in our heads?

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In Theater Plays New York City

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Ian McIntyre says

    May 19th, 2019 at 2:53 pm

    I enjoy the varied topics you hit on with your pieces! Never know what’s coming…great stuff!

    Reply

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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
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This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

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